ISABELLE SCHAD

Collective Jumps

source: isabelle-schadnet

Isabelle Schad’s new work, in collaboration with Laurent Goldring, addresses the topics of collectivity and resistance, investigating the possible relationships between freedom and form with a group of 16 dancers. Can the creation of an infinite, unified, monstrous body possibly become a site of resistance ? The presentations are accompanied by a lecture, a film and an artist talk.

Collective Jumps
(Upon reading Hannah Arendt : On Revolution)
’The group’s body is made out of many. We exercise practices that have the potential to unite instead of individualize. We understand these practices as a relationship to oneself and to one another, as a pathway. These practices are biological ones, cellular ones, energetic ones. We look at freedom in relation to form : to form that is made of and found by an inner process and its rhythms. Rhythm creates the form. Therefore, there is multitude, multiplicity, subjectivity, and variation : variation within repetition.

We look at freedom as the essence of happiness. We experience happiness when the flow of movement can be done together and be maintained. We look at freedom that is guaranteed once everyone within a group can find form in a subjective way. Therefore, there is a specific relation to the term equality : Everyone can be equal, once subjectivity in one‘s own respective rhythm is guaranteed within the form.

We look for equality in movement and for the end of hierarchy between body parts. Relations between body parts are like relations between people within the group. We play and distort in any kind of way. We differentiate synchronicity from synchronization. We understand synchronicity as the moment when things fall together in time, a phenomenon of energy. We borrow floor, formation, and holding patterns from other communally practiced forms, such as folk dance or Eastern body practices. We relate resistance to questions of rhythm. We relate protest to ques­ tions of organization and exercise. We look at the esthetics of representation and the kind we are trying to resist. We look at the esthetics of representation as a political practice. Could the creation of an infinite, unified, monstrous body possibly become a site of resistance ? Could the body itself become a site of resistance, the body of a dancer ?’

Dancer and choreographer Isabelle Schad studied classical dance in Stuttgart and danced for many different choreographers before she started initiating her own projects in 1999. Her research focuses on the body and its materiality; the relationship between bodies, (re-)presentation, form and experience; practice as a learning process; community and political involvement – among others.

Her works are situated on the interface between dance, performance and the visual arts; they tour internationally. She has co-initiated numerous projects/groups that searched for connections between various fields of research and practice, whereby production methods are also questioned by participants. She teaches throughout the world and in various formats. She is the co-director of a project space in the Wiesenburg in Berlin.

A body veils itself. Enveloped in fabric, the dancing persona avoids the eyes of the observers, entangles itself in figures with changing properties, turns itself inside out and becomes material. At other moments, body parts emerge: a head, irritatingly disproportionate legs, a torso bending double. Fabric, skin, hair, limbs: parts that seem to have materialised democratically in the side-by-side arrangement of Isabelle Schad’s choreographic arrays. In collaborations with visual artist Laurent Goldring in such projects as »UNTURTLED« (since 2009) or »Der Bau« (2012/14), the constellations of formation within processes are investigated and presented in metamorphic moments of expression. These transformation pieces, which were created as duos and performed as solos, deal with experimentation and questions relating to the possibility of showing a body and its accessories that are in the state of development.

In contrast, in »Experience #1« (2012) manifold amplified suggestions of movement are created on stage. A total of 26 dancers swarm around one another, discover gestures of the unfinished, the half-formed and the yet-to-unfold. Though the call for form in dance often corresponds to traditional expectations of choreographic composition, Schad shows the moment of emergence for contemporary dancing configurations – fluid movement materials that do not allow themselves to be fixed within exactly framed images. Instead, they invite us to wander amongst polyphonic sketches of form.

The focus of my work is the body in its materiality and its processuality and how we experience it: the body as a place, space and process. The relationship between the body and its representation is like that of a double membrane.
Isabelle Schad
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source: goethede